With respect, you don’t live in Nebraska and never have, right? I do. Your child’s friends and classmates don’t attend UNL? Mine do. Additionally I work at another college in the same city and routinely interact with students at UNL and have many friends, coworkers, neighbors, and acquaintances with ties to UNL.
Again, respectfully, you are doing the OP a disservice. The real benefit to a website like this is being able to get anonymous first hand information about these schools, their environment, and the economic impact both in terms of expenditure and potential income.
There is no contest between UNL and UIUC. While on paper UNL’s Raikes is prestigious, there is no comparison between the two schools. UIUC is ranked #33 and UNL is ranked #152. Does the OP want to be a big fish in a small pond? If so, then UNL is the way to go. Does the OP want to be competitive nationally? Then UIUC deserves more consideration. As I said, we are willingly paying a lot more for our daughter to attend college out of state because of the ROI.
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I used this aggregator, last updated November 2024, to find out the percentage of in-state students at a few different flagships. Please note that there can be errors in third-party sources and that verifying information directly from each school’s CDS is best practice. But for my purposes, this was sufficient, and I’ve listed the schools from lowest in-state percentage to highest:
The percentage of in-state students at UNL is not far from that of UIUC, and is well below some other schools that are highly coveted by out-of-state students.
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Not only did you completely miss my point, but your comparisons are ridiculous. Are you really comparing UCLA and Cal to UNL?
The population of the entire state of Nebraska is just over 2 million people. The population of California is 39 million. Just LA and Orange Counties have a population of almost 14 million. For context, just those 2 counties have a population that is roughly equal to the population of Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, Oklahoma and both of the Dakotas combined.
Needless to say, Nebraska is a very rural state. Added to that, about half of the state’s population lives in the Omaha-Lincoln geographic corridor. When it is noted that 75% of UNL’s students are from Nebraska, that translates to the majority of them being from Omaha and Lincoln, a distance of about 60
miles. Compare that to the distance between San Francisco and San Diego (500 miles). At UNL, students can and do go home almost every weekend, or live at home. Students at UNL routinely attend college with their high school classmates. At UCLA or Cal, that is far less likely. In fact, as a UCLA student, it was rare to run into anyone I knew (I think 6 students from my high school attended UCLA. Over 100 students from my daughter’s graduating class attend UNL.)
As far as UVA and UNC, both schools are also in higher population high growth states.
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I can’t speak to the level of insularity at UNL. I can, however, speak to my own experience attending a midwestern flagship which, at the time, was either 73% in-state or 67%. I was from out-of-state, and 5 of the 6 of my closest friends were from in-state. These friends did not know each other prior to arriving at the flagship (outside of attending a weekend competition for an elite college scholarship). Five of us attended grad school out-of-state (all at Top X programs). Four of us still live out-of-state, with three of us living in highly populous coastal metro areas. For friends that were further on the periphery, the same type of story holds true.
The majority of my friends were part of an elite cohort (5 of the 6 attended the scholarship weekend with 4 receiving the scholarship), but Raikes is also a pretty elite cohort (35-40 students/year). I think it would behoove OP to ask to speak to current Raikes students to see what their experience has been like in terms of making friends with like-minded students (whether they are Nebraska residents or not)
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Well this is vague. Illinois is a Midwestern state but is ranked 6th in terms of population. Ohio is a Midwestern state that is ranked 7th in population: Nebraska is ranked 37th. I have friends who went to a one room schoolhouse in Nebraska. The state slogan is “Nebraska: it isn’t for everyone.”
There is a huge misconception that because UNL is in a state capitol and has traditionally had big success in sports that it is the same as
other big name State U’s. It is not. Nebraska as a state is rural, agricultural, and simply is not competitive with the rest of the country, except when it comes to the tax burden. Another way to put it is that Nebraska is extremely average, except for the weather extremes and costs.
OP, FWIW I asked my daughter about you choosing between UNL and UIUC (she has many friends at UNL). She laughed kind of incredulously and said you shouldn’t even think twice about choosing UIUC.
